Jeremy Margolis’s article,“AI is breaking high school. Students are starting to sound the alarm” on April 18, is a comprehensive piece well worth reading. He writes, “The students described feeling sapped of motivation, noticeable cognitive deterioration among their peers and a sense of hopelessness about whether their school leaders were equipped to address the problems they see.”
I was fortunate in my teaching years in Hanover between 1962 and 1987 to have lively, interested, curious students (not everyone of them course). Students brought in who they were. Together we faced the same information. But were I teaching today, I would not be certain who would be walking through the door. Students who spend hours on their devices would partly be a “product” of them; who they really are would be hard to know. And those who relied on AI for their homework or their writing are partly/largely a product, not themselves.
We’ve known for sometime now that when a person at a table with friends takes out her phone, she is no longer there. Whatever conversation was happening for her ends. Interruptions make for more interruptions. Soon she and her friends are no longer together, the screens’ algorithms have won. Now AI, as Margolis makes clear, is interfering with who students are and who they are becoming.
The classroom may be the only place where students can be with themselves, where they can learn to look one another in the eye, listen to each other’s thinking, feel free to think and express themselves without props. No phones in the room (or in the school). No Chromebooks — if in the room — connected to the Internet. Just human beings together face to face, being human. The more we let digital devices live our lives, the less human we become.
AI is remarkable. It can do so much, so fast that it astonishes us. And it will be with us from now on and will only get better at what it does. But when we let AI substitute for our being human, we become less. A student who completes high school having AI do his homework, write his papers, take his tests raises the question: Who is he when he graduates? What kind of person is he? What will he be able to contribute to society?
Most interesting, Margolis tells us that students themselves are concerned about the impact of AI. He writes, “Martin Pennington, a Concord High School senior, estimated that 80% of his classmates have used AI on schoolwork in ways that are not allowed.” Margolis later adds, “The students interviewed said they notice their classmates’ heavy reliance on AI is making them less capable thinkers.” They are like the child watching the emperor and noticing that he has no clothes.
Were I a teacher now, I would struggle, as teachers now do, for ways to connect with my students’ apparent lack of interest. At first, I might dumb down my expectations in trying to reach them. Soon, however, I would discover that we would be going down a rabbit hole. Instead, I could take another tact and challenge them to do more! I would do it in class with my students, just them and me. No other devices. We would wrestle with whatever is before us. I would be inviting them to evaluate, and weigh evidence. They would need to think, a natural human process.
And I would do my best to downplay grades. Margolis quotes senior Martin Pennington, “I used to be motivated to learn, and now there’s just really not much to be motivated for when you feel that school is more about just receiving a grade than learning, and there’s such an easy way for people to do that and cheat through that.” I discovered early in my career that good students often focused more on grades than on learning. I did whatever I could to shift this mindset, including in 1964, giving all As to my top-section eighth graders for the year from the first day. It worked.
One more idea: I sometimes think, now as a writer, that high school transcripts should focus on character development other than grades. How this would be possible would require a paradigm shift in school culture, an inherently difficult challenge. Still, sometimes apparently outlandish ideas can take hold.
Franks Thoms taught at Hanover Junior-Senior High School between 1962 and 1987 and served as an educational consultant at more than 125 public and private schools in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. He is currently based in Mexico.